Sudha Murty

Timeline

1. 1950Born in Shiggaon, Haveri district, the daughter of a surgeon and a schoolteacher.
2. 1972Completes a degree in electrical and electronics engineering at BVB College of Engineering, now KLE Technological University.
3. 1974Joins TELCO as a development engineer, the first woman engineer hired by the company, after writing to its chairman about the men only hiring policy.
4. 1978Marries N. R. Narayana Murthy.
5. 1981Her savings provide the ₹10,000 with which Infosys is founded.
6. 1996Starts the Infosys Foundation and leads it for twenty four years.
7. 2001Dollar Bahu, her novel written in Kannada, is adapted as a television series by Zee TV.
8. 2006Awarded the Padma Shri for social work.
9. 2011The Murty Classical Library of India is established with Harvard University Press.
10. 2020Retires from the Infosys Foundation.
11. 2023Awarded the Padma Bhushan, and honoured among the Padma awardees announced that year.
12. 2024Nominated to the Rajya Sabha on 8 March for contributions to social work and education.

Early life and education

Sudha Murty was born on 19 August 1950 in Shiggaon in Haveri district, the daughter of R. H. Kulkarni, a surgeon, and Vimala Kulkarni, a schoolteacher. She was raised by her parents and her maternal grandparents, and those years in a small town with a joint family produced much of the material in her first well known books.^[1]

She took a degree in electrical and electronics engineering at the BVB College of Engineering, now KLE Technological University, and then a master's degree in computer science at the Indian Institute of Science in Bengaluru.^[1]

Engineering and the TELCO postcard

Murty studied electrical and electronics engineering at the BVB College of Engineering and then took a master's degree in computer science at the Indian Institute of Science. Applying to TELCO, then India's largest vehicle manufacturer, she was told the company did not hire women engineers, and she wrote a postcard to the chairman complaining about it. The result was an interview and a job as a development engineer, working in Pune, Mumbai and Jamshedpur, and a place as the company's first woman engineer. She later worked as a senior systems analyst at the Walchand group and taught at Christ University.^[1][2][6][7]

Infosys Foundation

The Foundation, started in 1996, works on education, rural development, healthcare and the arts, and it is the vehicle through which she has built libraries, funded school facilities across Karnataka, supported sanitation programmes and restored heritage structures. She has described the work as a set of small, specific interventions rather than large announcements, and the interviews she gives on it are mostly about execution.^[1][7][8]

She retired as chairperson in 2020, having run the foundation for twenty four years, and remains associated with public health work as a member of the Gates Foundation's initiatives.^[1]

Writing

Her books are read as moral stories more than as literature, and they are reviewed on those terms: short narratives with a lesson, drawn from family and from the towns she knows, published in Kannada first and translated afterwards. The two adaptations that travelled furthest are Dollar Bahu, which Zee TV serialised in 2001, and Runa, which became the Marathi film Pitruroon; she has also appeared in a Kannada film herself.^[1][4][5]

The Murty Classical Library of India, established in 2011 with Harvard University Press, is her most durable publishing project: translations from Sanskrit, Tamil, Persian and Kannada printed with the original text facing them, which is a different kind of writing from her own.^[1]

Books

• How I Taught My Grandmother to Read, the story collection that made her a familiar name in Indian schools.
• Wise and Otherwise, short portraits of people she met while working, written as moral observation rather than fiction.^[1]
• Dollar Bahu, a novel about a family divided between India and the United States, adapted for television by Zee TV in 2001.^[1]
• Runa, the story that became the Marathi film Pitruroon.^[1]
• Memoirs and travel writing, including accounts of her years at TELCO and of working with the Infosys Foundation.^[1]

Views and public voice

Murty writes and speaks in plain, short sentences and uses her own family as the evidence, which is why she is read widely in Indian schools and quoted often in the press. Her subjects are the ones she has lived: a middle class girlhood in a small Karnataka town, the men only sign at a factory gate, household work that falls on women, and the habit of giving that she argues should be taught rather than announced.^[1][3][7]

She has been direct about the limits of philanthropy. Her position, stated repeatedly in interviews about the foundation's work in sanitation and heritage restoration, is that a funder should pay for something specific and then leave the running of it to people who live with it.^[7][8]

Parliament and public life

Murty was nominated to the Rajya Sabha in March 2024, joining the small group of people brought into Parliament for work outside politics. Her public statements since have stayed close to her earlier subjects, education and health, and she has been a consistent voice on the position of women in Indian households and workplaces.^[1][3][5]